Plot:
Bill Randa (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) are convinced that monsters exist – and they may be hiding on a recently discovered island. When they can finally secure funding for an expedition there, they hire ex-military tracker James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), a group of soldiers under command of Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) to make sure they succeed in finding and documenting whatever lives on that island. But once they get to the island, things don’t go according to plan.

Over and over again I try to like kaiju movies and over and over again, I fail. In this case, though, it’s mostly because Kong: Skull Island really sucks.

Kong: Skull Island might resonate most with those who have a love for/encyclopedic knowledge of Vietnam War Movies. It’s not only set just after the Vietnam War, it also plays with that particular cinematic canon a lot. Unfortunately that just adds to the feeling of genericness and clichés that accompanies the film at every second.

Every once in a while the craptastic masterpiece this could have been shines through. This is never more apparent than in arguably the strongest and definitely most memorable scene of the film that involves Hiddleston, a samurai sword, toxic gas and pterodactylus. That’s the movie I would have loved to see all the way through. Unfortunately, it is only a single scene.

The movie struggles on almost every level: there were too many monsters (yes, I didn’t think this was possible either), too many scenes done in the most cheesy way you can imagine, the dialogues were atrocious and Hiddleston, as much as I like him and as pretty as he is, was absolutely the wrong choice for the role.

But worst of all, the film was boring and with its two hour runtime it just didn’t seem to stop. No size of beautifully animated ape could have saved that.